Guest: Tabitha Soren on a Fantasy Life

Tabitha will be at Oakland Coliseum Saturday to say goodbye ...

My friend Tabitha Soren — how cool is it to be able to say that I know Tabitha Soren? — is doing a farewell event this Saturday to baseball at her beloved Oakland Coliseum. We haven’t talked enough on here about the emotional toll that this A’s nonsense has taken on the fans. It’s just the worst. The A’s ownership, MLB, the A’s ownership, the various negotiators and also the A’s ownership should absolutely be ashamed of themselves. Are they really going to play the next three or four seasons in Sacramento so that they can possibly one day play in Vegas? Really?

In any case, Tabitha is a marvelous photographer, and her book Fantasy Life does such a wonderful job of capturing the story of young baseball players trying to make it to the big leagues.

She will be in the East Side Club at the Coliseum on Saturday, from 4:30-5:15 to sign books and to talk about the raw emotions and some happy memories.

I asked her to write a few words about the Oakland Coliseum and her journey in baseball and what it all means.

So much baseball history has taken place at the Oakland Coliseum, my hometown stadium. The local complaint about the Coliseum is that it was a much better stadium before they built “Mt. Davis” for the Raiders.* 

*Joe here: In 1995, the Oakland City Council approved 20,000 extra seats to urge Al Davis to bring the Raiders back to Oakland. A tarp has been draped over those 20,000 seasons — nicknamed Mount Davis — for A’s games since 2013. It was draped over for Raiders games too before the team left again.

That said, I have great memories of shooting my baseball photography series Fantasy Life there. It’s also the sight of the best surprise I ever concocted for my daughters. I got them in the car and said I was taking them to an A’s game. They were confused as to why everyone in the parking lot was wearing pink.

Only as we were walking to the gate at the Oakland Arena rather than the Coliseum did they realize we were actually headed to the Hannah Montana concert happening in the Oakland Arena.  

Saturday will be my final Athletics game at the Coliseum. The team’s last home game there is Sept 26^th, but this is it for me. It still amazes me that I shot 15 years of photographs about baseball. I wasn’t a baseball fan when I started, but the players were such a great example of how much pressure we all feel to be great, to be number one, to be exceptional, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to use baseball as a social critique.

Each body of work that I have made speaks to the twists of fate that can unhinge us. As an artist, I'm most interested in what human beings can survive – and what we can’t. In 2002, I started photographing a group of ⁠minor league draft picks for the Oakland A’s—young men⁠ coming into the major league farm system straight from high⁠ school or college. I followed the players through their baseball lives, an alternate reality of long bus rides, on-field injuries, friendships, marriages entered and exited, constant motion, and very hard work, often for very little return. 

Out of the 20 players in Fantasy Life, six survived the farm system and made it to the major leagues. Some even won a World Series ring (like catcher John Baker, power hitter Nick Swisher and pitcher Joe Blanton). My camera also followed them after they quit, retired or were released. I wanted to see how they would rebuild their identity outside of baseball. 

Some left baseball to pursue other lines of work, such as selling insurance and coal mining. Others have struggled with poverty and even homelessness.

Each of the players’ stories in the photographs contains its own special combination of luck, control, chaos, and unpredictability. Fantasy Life examines the precarity of a person’s fate when it hangs by the thread of perpetual self-perfection.  Seeing anyone strive to touch greatness is a powerful thing to watch.

Tabitha will be signing books from 4:30-5:15 at the Oakland Coliseum. Next month, select Fantasy Life photographs and a sculpture made of players’ bone spurs will be included in Get in the Game: Sports, Art, Culture,  on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, October 19, 2024–February 18, 2025.